The current paper document processing environment is heavily dependent upon paper processing, which can be inefficient. What is needed is an electronic paper document capture, storage, and process system to alleviate or otherwise mitigate the dependence upon paper form of items such as personal and business checks, for example.
In current systems for electronic processing of checks, for example that described in U.S. Pat. No. 6,032,137, because items will be uploaded from many sources, there is an opportunity for upload volume peaks and valleys. And, since merchants are provided with a specific cut-off time after which, if they have not uploaded items by then, the merchants can potentially lose one day's float, it is expected that a significant upload volume peak will occur during the hour (or even minutes) prior to the cut-off time. This volume problem needs to be addressed given that this spiky arrival pattern, and given the fact that the system will inherently have an upper limit on the intake (or capture) throughput it can sustain. In addition, different uploads will belong to different banks (e.g. customers of the system) but the items associated with each of the different banks will be co-mingled during the upload stages. It is desirable to prepare and forward for settlement a settlement file (associated with the uploaded items) as soon as possible after the specified cut-off time, and different banks will have different cut-off times.
A further problem in current systems is inherent in centralised processing of the items, where all decisioning of the items to result in selected settlement paths is carried out at a host system, thus providing for potential bottlenecks in item processing during peak volume periods, for example.
A further problem is in efficient management of the system when it includes a plurality of client systems (for uploading the items) and one of more respective host systems (for processing the items to assign a respective settlement path) in the environment of multiple customers of the system, all with their own settlement and item processing needs.